Since we're not doing much in the way of school right now - and that includes art class - and my camera is practically worthless, I'll be pulling from past art projects to share on my refrigerator.

This project is from a couple years ago, and the ideas come from the book Geography Through Art by Sharon Jeffus and Jamie Aramini.

I gave each kid a blackline world map, and they labelled and colored the maps. We tore the edges and folded them very small and sharply creased those folds so that the maps would look well-used and a bit tattered and worse for wear.

Then we unfolded the maps and "painted" them with strong tea.

While the paper was still wet, we crumpled them up and left them to dry overnight. In the morning we carefully flattened them out a bit. The paper we used didn't soak up the tea all that well, but enough to stain the paper where it hadn't been colored and give it a slight look of brittleness.

The final step was to "paint" the maps again, this time with a thin coat of vegetable oil. Once that was dry, the maps looked rather like they had been around for a very long time! We mounted them on construction paper to display on our timeline wall.

On the wall, you can also see the chalk drawings we did - a view of earth from space, based on the photo taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972. We were also exploring the use of positive and negative space in this project.

Since we're on the subject of art, check out this post at Simple Mom: Life After Art. It's an interesting article about keeping the joy of creativity and art that most of us had when we were children. And there's a book giveaway too.